


You're My Tiny Kind Of Tragedy

by EverybodyKnowsIt



Series: I love you as the plant that never blooms [1]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Growing Up and Growing Pains, I am unfamiliar with linear timelines, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non AU, Unrequited Love, aka Sad Boi Hours, heartbreak in a series of vignettes, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 11:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20545499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverybodyKnowsIt/pseuds/EverybodyKnowsIt
Summary: Falling in love with Mark was simple, easy like sunwarmed rain rolling down his cheeks, bittersweet like grapefruits and sugar.Learning how to fall out of love is much harder.





	You're My Tiny Kind Of Tragedy

**Author's Note:**

> I love you as the plant that never blooms
> 
> but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
> 
> thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
> 
> risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
> 
> \--Pablo Neruda

As Donghyuck stands in the practice room late after everyone--almost everyone--else has left, blinds pulled back and the light of a fat moon reflecting gentle and grim off the wall of mirrors, he thinks that for all of Mark’s flaws, his repression and his temper and his pinching fingers that pluck at Donghyuck’s heartstrings, he is polite.

Mark is polite, even when he’s breaking Donghyuck’s heart. 

The most terrible part of it all is Donghyuck _ wants _ him to be angry. He wants Mark to yell, to throw his water bottle and get in his face, he wants anything except flinching tendons and silence. 

Donghyuck wants a lot of things, he finds, he always has, and once it’s in his grasp, he sinks his nails in and doesn’t let go. Taeyong says Donghyuck is tenacious, Ten--with his arching brow and flimsy patience--bites back that he’s stubborn as a mule. 

Mark says he’s too stupid to know when to quit.

“For fuck’s sake-- Say something!”

Mark falters, bites the inside of his cheek and furrows his brow, “Donghyuck, I’m-- I’m flattered. But I’m not that way. I’m not like," His voice quiets into a whisper, "Like _ that_.”

Donghyuck wants to scream, feels it claw up his throat, but it withers into a shallow breath and leaves his mouth as a murmur, “What do you mean like _ that_, Mark. I’m not a fucking leper. I’m just--” 

His voice starts to quiver, melts wet and sticky in his lungs, and Donghyuck will not cry, he will _ not_. He steels himself, counts the lashes fringing Mark’s narrowed eyes, “I’m just in love with you.”

But Mark blanches as soon as the word _ love _ leaves Donghyuck’s mouth, and he feels like he might as well have invisible sores littered across his skin, with the way Mark’s gaze skates across his body with careful, chilly distance. 

“You’re not in love with me,” Mark says slowly, taking a small step back. “You’re wrong, it’s wrong.”

Donghyuck reacts on autopilot, years of their one step forward two steps back drilled into his muscle memory, he makes the mistake of reaching for him, “Mark--”

“Don’t touch me!” Mark spits, as soon Donghyuck’s fingers make contact with his elbow. His eyes are wide and wild, an animal cornered.

Donghyuck rears back as if struck, racking his brain for a quip to play it all off--_I’m just kidding! You take yourself so seriously, Mark_\--but there is none. There is nothing to say that can take back what he’s said, because Mark knows Donghyuck like he knows the alphabet and the fifty states and the choreography to _ 7th Sense_, forward and backward and irrevocably.

Mark can always tell when Donghyuck is earnest, as rarely as it happens, so there is nothing more to say.

Donghyuck’s silence appears to do nothing to set Mark at ease, he’s blushing now: an upset, cherry-stained flush Donghyuck knows Mark has always hated about himself, “Don’t-- don’t touch me, Donghyuck. Don’t do this. Don’t be this way.”

_I can’t help it. Not when it feels like you’re half of me and I’m half of you. Not when you look like that._

Mark turns away silently, head hanging and Nikes squeaking near inaudibly against the wood. 

_You godless creature, _his mother used to laugh when he ran through the door with his school uniform unbuttoned and sand between his toes. Alone and shivering on the practice room floor, he thinks she’s never been more right.

* * *

Things are tense.

Everyone notices, not just other members but _ everyone_: the managers and producers and choreographers and it’s humiliating, how everyone knows how much Mark doesn't want him.

_You can almost count on it_, the staff joke, _wherever Haechan will be, Mark won’t._

Donghyuck doesn’t think it’s funny.

The next time they speak is after one particularly heavy V-Live, where the atmosphere crackles with what’s unsaid. Where Mark digs at Haechan a little too hard and Donghyuck snaps back a little too mean. Donghyuck almost feels bad with how Chenle and Jisung are forced to pick up the slack, Chenle laughing louder and Jisung pouting the way the girls always like to see, but he’s _ furious _ and doesn’t care enough to apologize.

He catches up to Mark in the hallway and shoves him, _ hard_, and takes spiteful joy in watching him stumble. “Am I _ joke _ to you?” Donghyuck bites, and Mark doesn’t get up from the floor.

“Fuck up my life all you want, but this is my job. Have the decency to leave _ our career _out of it.” He laughs, and he’s getting enough practice to model the sound into something real, something careless. It doesn’t fool Mark yet, whose eyebrows furrow deeper, “At least realize when you say that kind of shit you sound like a dick.”

Donghyuck leaves without waiting for Mark’s response. He doubts he was going to get one.

Mark stops mentioning Donghyuck in V-Live. He stops mentioning Donghyuck at all.

* * *

Donghyuck has been scrubbed clean and shiny through his debut, reborn as a Seoul city-boy idol with powdered pearl skin and puppet limbs, but at his core he has never changed. 

Donghyuck is at his roots an island boy. A salt-earth and laughter boy. A Jeju boy.

To the city-boy idol, to Haechan, home is not Jeju nor Seoul, but Mark Lee. The heavy press of Mark’s fingers on his skin, the cut of his figure in the center of practice formation, the comfort of his quiet presence in the dorms those quivering nights before debut.

Mark Lee was home to Haechan, but Mark doesn’t look at him anymore, and Donghyuck is starting to think he doesn’t know who Haechan is.

It’s too tender to dwell on, and he doesn’t like the way Seoul looks without Mark by his side, so Donghyuck thinks about Jeju instead.

Jeju, the place of his childhood and the place of the sea, where the sun kissed him each dawn and the wind chafed his ears ruddy and the salt air curled his hair to knots. 

There was a girl next door--three years his senior--he remembers. 

Joohyun-noona, with her thick curtain of hair and pale moon face and sly cut of a red mouth. She was lovely, Donghyuck recalls.

Every boy on Jeju rolled her name in their mouths like a glass marble, _ Joohyun-ah do you have a boyfriend? Noona do you like me? _But she never answered, just smiled that seashell-cut grin and shrugged, hair tumbling over her shoulders. 

It was never a no, but it was never a yes, either.

Donghyuck at thirteen used to think he was in love with her, but Donghyuck at eighteen looks back and thinks he was only in love with the way she was wanted.

Joohyun was kind to him, even though she didn’t have to be. She never teased him for the stars in Donghyuck’s eyes as he looked up at her, and she always accepted the scruffy, butter-yellow bundles of yuche flowers he would press into her hands. 

He thinks she knew he was lonely.

There was a murky dusk in January--the kind that smell like petrichor and trouble brewing--and Donghyuck was fourteen and riding high on the acceptance letter from SM Entertainment burning a hole in his pocket. The sea was churning grey and the sky was seething low over the coast.

Donghyuck was kicking rocks down the beach, a swing in his step and a pop song warbling through his teeth, when he spies a thin figure hunched by the water.

He edges closer. One foot in front of the other, tracks imprinted in the sand. The palm trees are moaning under the weight of the wind, but Donghyuck listens closer. 

_Listen, his piano teacher chastises, you’re a songbird, boy. But a pretty voice doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know how to listen. The music is only as good as the person who knows how to listen to what she’s saying._

The palms are crying, but Donghyuck is being taught how to listen, and so is the girl.

It’s a private moment, but Donghyuck _ is so nosy, his sister chides_, and he steps closer. 

It’s Joohyun-noona, which is strange because Donghyuck had always thought she was indestructible. He’d never seen her cry, not even at her grandma’s funeral, which Donghyuck had been dragged to after his mother had stuffed him in his first communion suit.

_Why is she crying__?_ He wonders, because he knows she has no more grandmas left to die.

He sits down next to her on the wet sand, worried but also gnawingly curious in the way fourteen-year-old boys tend to be. He’s balanced on the balls of his feet and poised to leave, fully expecting Joohyun to shoo him away, but she shocks him even more by leaning into his shoulder, and Joohyun is built like a sparrow, but Donghyuck is even lighter and they both topple into the sand.

“Are you okay, noona?” Donghyuck asks when he manages to right himself, and he wants to kick himself because _ of course she’s not okay, stupid, she’s crying_\-- But it seems to work out somewhat when Joohyun sniffles and gives him a small, gummy smile. 

“No,” she says. “I’m not, but thank you for asking anyway.”

Donghyuck nods sagely, and he hopes it makes him look older, but instead it just makes his bangs flop over his eyes. It makes Joohyun laugh, though, which is still nice, “Why are you sad? Maybe I can help.”

Joohyun sits back on the sand, careless of the way the sand sticks to her legs and how the wind whips her tears across her face. She looks fearless, unwild, “There’s nothing you can do, darling.” Her voice sounds almost wistful, “I just want too much, you know?”

Donghyuck wraps his arms around his knees, hums a few bars of the tune he sang at the SM audition, “Everyone always says I want too much, too. Is it such a bad thing?” Donghyuck throws his head back, lets drops of the sea blown by the breeze ripple in his hair. “You’re just one step closer to having it, whatever you want.”

Joohyun sucks in a small breath, one Donghyuck wouldn’t be able to hear if their elbows weren’t brushing, “_Her_.” 

Donghyuck stills. “Not it,” she says, “Her.” 

“Oh,” he responds, and he tries to think of the advice his mother gives when she consoles unlucky-in-love friends over the phone. He comes up empty and settles on the truth, “That sounds a lot more complicated, then.”

“Yeah,” she says. And she tells him about carrot-haired Kang Seul-gi in the grade below, who plays the guitar with quick fingers and remembers all of Joohyun’s favorite books. 

“I wanted more than she was willing to give,” she explains.

What she says seems weird, in contrast with what Donghyuck knows about love: marshmallow skin and summer sunbeams and glowing actors in dramas. He speaks before he can think better of it, “I thought falling in love was simple?”

Joohyun looks at him sharply, tears still glittering unshed in her eyes, “Everything has a price, Donghyuck-ah.” She laughs wearily, "And to Seulgi, I wasn’t worth mine.” Donghyuck tries to understand, but fourteen and sunblooded, it’s hard to comprehend wanting what you can’t have and not having what you want.

Four years later and across the water, he’ll learn.

* * *

Donghyuck and Mark used to pass time in airports and backstage playing a game called _ if I was a billionaire_.

Mark shifts his backpack to another shoulder as he hands Donghyuck a protein bar. There’s two hours till their delayed flight makes it to the terminal, and nothing to do but loiter and eat. Donghyuck winces as he takes note of the flavor, he’s told Mark _ countless _ times he hates the peanut butter ones--they gum up his mouth and stick in his throat--but the gesture of Mark thinking of him makes Donghyuck feel fuzzy and cotton-stuffed regardless. 

“If I was a billionaire...” Mark begins, “I would buy an apartment next to a dance studio and go there every day.”

He pauses and scrunches his nose and it pierces Donghyuck’s heart like a moonbeam, “No, I take it back. I would buy a mansion and have my own studio. There’d be a room for you too.” Mark squints, “Only if you’re nice to me, though.”

Donghyuck smiles at the fansite creeping behind a drink machine, “I’m always nice to you, _ hyung_,” and he lays the softness in his voice on thick how he knows Mark likes.

“If I was a billionaire...” _ I’d have you. Our own songs and our own album and the feeling of your skin under my teeth. _

Mark is looking at him expectantly, and Donghyuck coughs, “I’d bribe Doyoung into buying me food more often.”

Mark laughs at the ridiculousness of it, he slaps Donghyuck in the arm, and it stings a little too much, but Donghyuck finds comfort in the ache of it.

* * *

Mark is not gentle when he touches him.

Donghyuck used to dream of what it would be like to be held gently. They fight rough and tumble on linoleum floors and bicker in the crevice between bunk beds and jostle with sharp elbows on their way to the bathroom at four in the morning. 

_He started it_, Mark always says. Donghyuck will admit he’s not usually wrong.

_Donghyuck looked at me funny_, he says. _ Donghyuck teased me, Donghyuck pinched me, Donghyuck pushed me, Donghyuck, Donghyuck, Donghyuck--_

_Hyuckie, _he sighs, late at night in the dorms when Donghyuck pretends to be asleep. There are fingers carding through his hair and Donghyuck likes it, even though Mark’s fingers press too hard against his scalp.

Donghyuck can’t help it. Mark is not gentle with him, but only because Donghyuck doesn’t know how to give him room to breathe.

Mark has his fingers around Donghyuck’s neck, and Mark is joking, and Donghyuck is laughing, but that doesn’t temper the bite of them. Donghyuck can feel the skin purple and bruise like peachskin, and he dreams of being touched gently.

Mark never learns. Maybe Mark doesn’t care.

Mark knows that Donghyuck is in love with him. He doesn’t touch Donghyuck at all anymore.

Donghyuck used to dream of what it would be like to be touched gently, but now he even misses the bite of it, softer than lovesong and colder than iron. 

Mark will never be gentle with him, Donghyuck is learning, and Donghyuck used to dream that someday he would be, but you can’t force what’s not there, what will never be there.

* * *

_ Sometimes when you look at me, you make me feel like I’m worth the space I take up. _

_Even if I don’t want to, there’s a small part of my body that loves you, pulling me in with your gravity._

_You’re a burnup, baby, I blowup and we makeup, baby, but you’re my tiny kind of tragedy._

* * *

“Everyone is dying to know, Mark--” The television host smiles with too many glittering teeth, “What’s your ideal type?” Donghyuck tugs at the tie around his throat. He’s sick of this game, sick of Kim Heechul, sick of this schoolboy mockery they dressed him up as, most of all he’s sick of hearing about _ Mark Lee. _

Heechul croons--and the tenor of it is friendly--but Donghyuck has been in this business long enough to know better, “Who’s the type of person to get the little lion on his knees?”

Mark, leaning against a prop desk to Donghyuck’s left, stiffens. He laughs, tomato flush riding high on his cheekbones, but Donghyuck has been in the business of knowing Mark long enough to know better than to mistake laughter for comfort. Mark catches his eye. 

He has such strange eyes, Donghyuck thinks, clear dark ripe eyes. 

Mark looks away. Donghyuck swallows and stares at a spot above Heechul’s brow, where fat little sweat droplets are forming. “Girls,” Mark says, and Donghyuck’s heart sinks to his feet. “I like pretty girls-- pretty girls with long black hair.” Donghyuck can’t tell if Mark is assuring the cameras or himself. 

He wonders if at this point it matters.

_Pretty girls with long black hair_, and Joohyun-noona’s tearful face with oil slick hair spilling down her back emerges unbidden in his mind. _ Everything has a price_, she said, and with stage lights burning stars hot into his vision and Mark a careful five centimeters distant, Donghyuck can’t help but wonder if he’s paid it. 

A gentle squeeze of his elbow from his right brings him back, and Donghyuck has listened long enough to learn how to speak Taeyong’s silent language, a stern reminder to _ grin and bear it, just for now, just for now, just for now-- _

Donghyuck beams like empty dawn, stunning with nothing behind it. 

He smiles till his cheeks ache with the weight of it, smiles till filming finishes and then after, oblivious to the sharp-eyed gaze that follows him. Donghyuck smiles all the way to the empty third-floor bathroom and through the bitter tears as he sits cross-legged on the floor. It’s filthy, but he doesn’t care.

Minutes pass: one, two, then ten, then thirty, and Donghyuck knows he should get up, find his manager, get his shit and hit the road, leave it all behind, but he can’t force his body to stand and look into the eyes of a boy who hates him.

His soul feels too big for the body he lives in, and Donghyuck is so very tired.

The door to the bathroom creaks open and the intruder sighs at the sight of Donghyuck curled on the floor, a sound so gentle yet uniquely _ Taeyong _that Donghyuck knows it’s him without needing to look up through running, red-rimmed eyes.

As a singer, Donghyuck sometimes likes to think that certain sounds belong to people, that they wrap up their essence and present it to the world wrapped in a neat little bow: the way Taeyong sighs in a way that is both chastisement and comfort, how Taeil hums low and soft as he listens to music in the car while it rains, the way Mark laughs at midnight-- and thinking of him _ hurts_, raw and naked like skinned knees on concrete.

Donghyuck buries his face in his hands, desperate to hide from the way Taeyong inches closer as tears drip hot and sticky down his cheeks, “What’s wrong, Haechan-nie,” Taeyong murmurs. He peers out of the corner of his eyes to see Taeyong gingerly lowering himself next to Donghyuck on the floor, and the sight of prim and tidy Taeyong perched uncomfortably on grimy tile in shiny leather pants is so strange it forces a blubbery laugh out of his throat. “What’s wrong,” Taeyong repeats, and Donghyuck just cries harder through the laughter.

_I don’t know how to unlearn loving him when it’s all I’ve ever known how to do._

Taeyong won’t understand, he thinks. Anyone would be blind or stupid to not want Taeyong, and even if they didn’t, Taeyong, so lost in his head with the music or the movement, wouldn’t care. 

But it’s so lonely like this, and Taeyong is here, and warm, and his marble cheeks are shining under the fluorescent lights. He’s tired of feeling like a repulsive thing, like a broken boy who doesn’t know how to love right. 

He’s growing tired of being alone.

Donghyuck thinks that Taeyong couldn’t possibly understand, but like a one-winged sparrow crumpled on the ground, there is nowhere left to go but into these hands.

He tells Taeyong everything.

He tells Taeyong about the night in the practice room with the pale, fat moon hanging in the sky and the look in Mark’s eyes when he told Donghyuck that this kind of love is not something to be shared. He tells Taeyong about how he misses Jeju and Joohyun-noona and the sun blushing his skin, about the way his blood runs bitter in his veins when Mark flinches from him like he’s something corrupted, about how sometimes he feels more tired when he wakes up than when he went to sleep, how sometimes he can’t tell where _ Haechan _ starts and Donghyuck ends and he _ doesn’t know what to do, hyung, and-- _

Taeyong puts his hands on Donghyuck’s, and the touch is cool and firm, offset by the delicate points of his wrist. “_Breathe_, Donghyuck-ah,” Taeyong murmurs, and Donghyuck takes in a gasp of stale air. It smells like mildew and lemon disinfectant, and he wrinkles his nose but it grounds him nonetheless. “Breathe,” Taeyong repeats quietly. “You’re okay, and you’re not alone. I’m here with you.” The vice grip of panic around his throat fades, and a weight he didn’t know he was burdened with slides off his shoulders, just a little bit, just enough for him to breathe. 

Taeyong will take care of him, Donghyuck realizes, he always has. “What do I do?” Donghyuck asks, and he can’t help the way his sore voice cracks in the middle. “What do I do about-- about him?”

“I don’t really know,” Taeyong admits. “I was a shy kid, and when I came to the company I was too busy to ever learn how to love someone like that-- love them with my whole body. How to love them with more than that.” Donghyuck thinks Taeyong is better at loving people than he gives himself credit for, but it’s not his place to say.

Taeyong’s love is NCT’s backbone, meals shared and burdens carried. Donghyuck’s love is their wrecking ball, selfish and hungry and the bitterness of a boy scorned.

“I don’t know a lot about love, but I know how to dance,” Taeyong continues. “Sometimes you forget yourself and fall into it, fall in love with movement so deep and so hard that it blisters you, and you don’t stop dancing until you can barely stand.” His fingers fidget, flutter in the air like they can’t help it, crooked and thrice broken.

“You blister and you bleed and it hurts so much you forget how to breathe, but Donghyuck-ah,” Taeyong smiles, a watery grin that shines with a gentle kind of heartbreak. “It heals, and it scars. And scar tissue is stronger than the flesh before ever was.”

Donghyuck hiccups, the sound echoing loudly in the bathroom, he feels the tears start to dry salty and tight on his cheeks, “What heals the wounds into scars? What will _ fix me_?”

Taeyong reaches a hand to the back of Donghyuck’s neck, squeezes once, squeezes twice, runs his fingers up through Donghyuck’s hair, unwashed and crunchy with bleach as it might be, “You don’t need to be fixed.”

“Loving someone doesn’t ever need to be fixed, but only time can heal the pain of it.” 

“Only time,” Donghyuck echoes as Taeyong gathers him in an embrace, and he thinks Taeyong knows how to hurt. 

The two of them speak grief like a language, Taeyong with his burdens and Donghyuck with his heartbreaks. There is comfort in that, in heaving on the bathroom floor with glass arms wrapped around you, there is solace if nothing else.

* * *

_I don’t deserve to have you, I know that’s just how life is._

_When I drink too much I see your face behind my eyelids._

_This gentle kind of depravity, my tiny kind of tragedy._

* * *

Mark is close with Johnny in a way he never was _ (never will be) _ with Donghyuck. People say that blood is thicker than water, but the ocean that separates Mark and Johnny from the rest of them gives them an easy kind of brotherhood, kinship found in the way their tongues curve around the loops of English when Donghyuck can never divorce the strangeness of it from his mouth. 

The cameras like it when they call each other _ hyung, _so they do, but Donghyuck knows the word means more when Mark uses it with Johnny. So when Johnny ambles up to him in the empty cafeteria late at night with Mark Lee’s name on his lips, Donghyuck knows it _ means something_, because Mark confides in Johnny about things Donghyuck can barely begin to imagine.

“You just need to try harder with him,” Johnny says, pushing a can of peach tea into Donghyuck’s hands. “He’s-- Mark is--” Johnny groans, runs his fingers through greasy hair. He looks more twenty-three than Donghyuck has ever seen him, so young it makes his heart ache, “Mark is confused... about a lot of things. You just need to work harder, and he’ll come around.”

Donghyuck pops the lid open and takes a sip, peaches and midnight and ennui bursting on his tongue. He wonders when his life started to revolve around the rhythms of Mark Lee’s comings and goings. It’s almost unfair, Donghyuck thinks, how tight Mark had him in his grip without even knowing it.

“Maybe so,” he says, as he takes another sip of ice tea. “But I shouldn’t have to.”

He watches the moon rise as Johnny leaves, thinks he’s starting to have an easier time unraveling _ Donghyuck _ from _ Haechan._

Love has no mercy, but pitted against heartbreak, neither does time.

* * *

Weeks pass and Donghyuck surrounds himself with good things: singing in the shower, the warmth of Taeyong’s hands on his shoulders, hot coffee with too much sugar, honey bread stolen from Doyoung’s palm, running his fingers through Renjun’s butterscotch hair and city lights kissing his skin at night that in a way almost feel like Jeju sunlight. Things he loves.

He is exhausted, bone-weary, awake from sunrise to dusk, and things are not good, but they’re getting better.

He can’t forget, but Donghyuck is learning to take the memories and sit with them, to let them hurt and let them go.

Donghyuck is learning how to wait, how to heal, how to live a life without Mark Lee. He finds there’s still beauty in it.

Mark catches his eye in the sun-warmed kitchen on Sunday, and for the first time in months, Donghyuck smiles in return. He’s planning on meeting Jeno at a little scrap of a gaming cafe in the middle of the city and he turns away to pull on his shoes and tug on a mask.

“Where are you going?” Mark asks, hesitant.

Donghyuck from two months ago would have snarled a response, would take the pain clenched between his teeth and spit it back out, would make it hurt. Donghyuck from a year ago would have invited Mark to come along with him.

“Out,” he says simply, and he doesn’t turn around to see the expression on Mark’s face as he leaves.

* * *

Picture this: there is a boy with cinnamon eyes and a fear of the devil calling his name, and Donghyuck is in love with him. There is a boy who collects song lyrics the way others collect stamps or pencils or sea glass, and Donghyuck is desperate for them. 

Against his better judgment, Donghyuck pockets a battered black leather notebook Mark forgets in the back of the van one afternoon. He reads it in one go sitting on the balcony while Taeil busies himself with a podcast, and his heart swells with what he finds. 

_You’re both the subject and the one who controls me, hit me with that smile baby you’re my little fantasy._

_I hate that I want you, Hyuckie, you’re my tiny kind of tragedy_

Donghyuck isn’t used to fearing what he wants, he doesn't understand it, so if Mark writes that he _ hates _how he wants Donghyuck, he tells himself the proof is there regardless that Mark wants him.

He approaches Mark in the practice room the next night.

But Donghyuck learns that Mark knows a fear of God so deep Donghyuck can barely fathom, and maybe Haechan is okay with being a boy’s dirty little secret, but Donghyuck _ isn’t_, and he learns the world doesn’t end with loss.

* * *

They’re older and more famous and drunk out of their minds in the city of angels when Mark finally tells Donghyuck the truth.

“You’re-- Hyuckie-- you're still my tiny kind of tragedy,” Mark slurs as Donghyuck lays him gently on the narrow hotel couch.

Donghyuck searches for the twinge of pain in his chest with the admission, but there is none. He doesn’t really remember how to love Mark as he used to, the longing that used to sear his skin has quieted, and he is not one half of _ Mark and Haechan, _ but one whole of Donghyuck.

But it felt nice, he remembers, to feel like part of something bigger than what he was, and the nostalgia aches sweetly. 

“And you were mine,” Donghyuck says softly as he leaves.

He turns around at the threshold of the room. “I used to see the stars in you, Mark Lee,” But he laughs when he sees Mark has already fallen asleep, eyeliner smudged half down his cheeks and mouth hanging open. 

Maybe next time.

**Author's Note:**

> Talk to me on twt @sidstarbursts   
<3333


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